Friday, October 19, 2012

50… 50, With the Glass Half Full

I celebrated my fiftieth birthday the other day; my 3rd
birthday celebration in Wuhan. Zhanny and Dash, all that is left of the
original Cookie Cutter girls and a part of what I consider my Chinese family
celebrated with me on the eve of ‘my day’. We ate ‘jiao zi (dumplings) for good
luck, and then they surprised me with a small cake that we shared in the park
by my former apartment, at the very same low table where we ate my first ever
Chinese birthday cake (and got into a cake war). See the ‘Happy Birthday to
Me!’ entry, posted way back in September 2010 for details of this unusual
Chinese custom.

My Sophomore group of students that I had last year as
Freshmen were invited over to watch The Notebook the evening of my actual
birthday. Titanic has just re-released over here and all the girls are ga-ga
for the romance of it. They don’t know anything. In my opinion, The Notebook is
far more romantic than Titanic ever thought of being. What is your take on the
subject?

They had never seen The Notebook and were suitably
impressed. Even the guys. Of course, I had to fast forward through the two sex
scenes, relatively tame as they are.

I’ve learned in my tenure here that it is tradition to host
a birthday party for yourself. When first acquainted with this practice it
seemed to me terribly arrogant to throw oneself a birthday party, and in a
sense it still does. However, the more I study and learn and become a part of
Chinese culture and society the more I understand it. Throwing oneself a
birthday party implies you want to share your day with your friends. It is kind
of like a wedding: you want the people most special in your life to be with you
on that momentous occasion. Of course it has more import in China than that
same situation does in the West. In China the newlyweds (and birthday
girls/boys) serve their guests, whereas in the west, specifically in America
the newlyweds (and birthday girls/boys) are the ones being served.

I have no wedding plans at all, so my half-century birthday
will have to serve as my momentous occasion. It is quite a milestone, isn’t
it?

Too bad I had to celebrate hatted and plastered. My birthday
falling on Friday of the week I took my spill (pardon the pun), I still had
stitches in my head, facial swelling and the cast on my arm. None of that kept
me from preparing a substantial amount of food: pork and lotus root soup,
meatballs in barbecue sauce and chicken in a type of spicy Alfredo sauce of my
own creation. The coffee table was liberally covered with individually packed
snacks as well as large bowls of chips and other munchies. All of it got
gobbled up, with the exception of 5 snack packs. That is another phenomenon I
am by now well acquainted with: these kids are eating machines! Even if they
come over having just finished their dinner they will eat as much as is served
and then some.

Now I have attained an age that I had previously thought as
a line of demarcation between living and being set out on an ice floe to await
my sure demise, as per Eskimo lore. Do I feel any closer to expiring than I did
last year or the year before?

In an email exchange with my dear friend and constant
correspondent Kevin I tapped out my true feeling.

l consider myself charging into the years ahead - however
many more years l'm granted - with wild exuberance, like a formerly confined
creature finally set free. lmagine a mustang – the 4-legged kind: hooves
pounding, mane flowing, muscles rippling beneath its shiny pelt as it gallops
across a vast, open, uncharted plain. That is how l see myself, and how l
strive to live: with zest, elan, whole-heartedly and passion driven.

I honestly do not know where these words came from. The best
explanation I can give is that they sprang from the very depths of my soul. Typing
one-handed, my right fingers flew across the keyboard with virtually no
conscious awareness of what I was writing. As though coming out of a trance, I
shook myself, got a glass of tea and returned to read over what I had written.
I was surprised, both at the poetry and the rightness of my words. Kevin gave
me permission to reprint what I had written exclusively to him, provided I
shared the credit.

Thank you Kevin, for provoking these thoughts and for your
blessing in reprinting, as well as for your birthday wishes.

Obviously I feel like I am poised at the very brink of the
beginning of my existence. None of us knows how much time we are granted, and
we are all gifted with each day: a new chance to learn, to love and to live.

What if we did know? What if, while I was having my head
MRI’ed, the doctors had found an inoperable growth and gave me only weeks to
live?

That idea ties in with a question my son had asked me a few
years back, before I set off on my China adventure: what is on my bucket list?

At that time I did not have a bucket list, at least not a
consciously developed, concisely formulated one. What makes me so introspective
now?

My students. One of the projects I dreamed up for my
students this year is for them to imagine they only have 2 weeks to live. What
would they do? Where would they go? I plan on making it the topic of their
mid-term exam: give a 2-minute speech about the last 2 weeks of your life.

It is always interesting to hear what these kids think and
what their priorities are. I’ll bet most will say “I will spend it with my
family” but some will come up with imaginative projects like mountain climbing,
or visiting the country of their dreams (provided it is not China). If they
cannot envision themselves leaving China, most likely they will intone
something to the effect of visiting someplace in China, probably with their
family.

There are plenty of places I still want to go, in and out of
China. But if I had to pick a place I’d like to visit as a destination fit for
a bucket list it would be Tristan da Cunha.

I first learned of this collection of 3 tiny islands smack
in between the coasts of Africa and South America from Fletcher Knebel’s story
Vanished. It is a tale of world leaders hatching a plan for peace. Of course,
all great things cost some sort of sacrifice and most of the story dealt with
the family of the American President’s envoy to that meeting: how were his wife
and daughter managing the disappearance? How did their story unfold? Because
that representative is so well known the media made the most of his
disappearance. As naturally as had the events actually unfolded, the
newscasters took the theme into improbable realms: He has committed a crime, he
is homosexual and gone on a tryst, a terrorist faction kidnapped him…

We can see from this dated tale that the media has not
changed very much over time.

I’d like to visit Tristan Da Cunha for its isolation, for
its beauty and to be a part of a civilization that boasts a mere 275 people.
They have no Internet and virtually no connection to the outside world. They
are a completely self-contained society. Only one island is inhabited and at
that, only partially. There is only one way to get there: by sea. So brutal is
the weather and so treacherous are the seas that the island’s only port is
accessible about four months out of the year. I relish the challenge of even
getting there.

Why the focus on a bucket list when obviously I have no
abnormal growth threatening my life and my subconscious dictated words
indicative of the idea that I feel I am at the start of my existence?

It is not the list I’m focusing on rather than the contents.
Since I learned that my students, by nature and by nurture only envision
probabilities without embracing possibilities, I have made it my mission to
expand their horizons. Maybe they’ve never heard of Tristan da Cunha. Maybe
they have but never envisioned themselves going there.

With a half century of living behind me and, it seems, many
more years to come, I’d like to open their minds, hearts and eyes to a whole
different world: the world of possibility.